Paper documents duplicated from original data might deteriorate in readability quality as compared with original data in such a manner that the original data would be printed in monochrome instead of color, overwritten with memos, printed with a woven pattern, or deteriorate in image quality. In addition, duplicated data or paper documents might be deteriorated in readability quality purposely so as to be duplicated with such an important part as a personal information field, including a personal name in the original data, being masked.
Paper documents or duplicated data further duplicated from the duplicated paper documents or duplicated data deteriorate in quality more than the original data.
To produce a duplicate of the same quality as that of the original data from a certain duplicate, it is necessary to independently retrieve original data corresponding to the duplicate from an information system and perform duplicating.
As this type of duplicating technology, for example, a method has been proposed which enters original images of documents in a server in advance, retrieves an original image by image matching based on a scanned image of a document at the time of duplicating and, if the original image is found in the server, replaces the scanned image with the original image, and outputs a high-quality duplication.
The aforementioned method has no problem in ordinary practice. However, the inventor's examination has shown that it is conceivable that the method has room for improvement, taking into account inconveniences caused in some cases.
For example, when a duplicated image has been deteriorated, the following inconveniences are caused: the original image cannot be retrieved because retrieving is performed based on image matching and therefore the retrieval efficiency is low.
In addition, when the original data includes an important part, the following inconvenience is caused: the operation of producing a duplication of the same quality as that of the original data from a certain duplication cannot be suppressed according to permission or conditions because there is neither a security rule to determine whether to permit duplicating nor a criterion for determining conditions for the permission of duplicating.
An object of the invention is to provide a selective duplicating system and an information management server device which are capable of not only preventing inconveniences from being caused when a duplicated image has deteriorated or when original data includes an important part but also producing a duplication of the same quality as that of the original data from a certain duplication.